Wednesday, October 24, 2007

As when on a holiday, to see the fieldA countryman goes out, at morning, whenOut of the hot night the cooling lightning flashes had fallenThe whole time and the thunder still sounds in the distance,The river enters its banks once more,And the fresh ground becomes greenAnd with the gladdening rain from heavenThe grapevine drips, and gleamingIn quiet sunlight stands the trees of the grove:

So in favorable weather they standWhom no master alone, whome she, wonderfullyAll-present, educates in a light embrace,The powerful, divinely beautiful nature.So when she seems to be sleeping at times of the yearUp in the heavens or among plants or the peoples,The poets' faces also are mourning,They seem to be alone, yet are always divining.For divining too she herself is resting.

But now day breaks! I awaited and saw it come,And what I saw, may the holy be my word,For she, she herself, who is older than the agesAnd above the gods of Occident and Orient,Nature is now awakening with the clang of arms,And from high Aether down to the abyss,According to firm law, as once, begotten out of holy Chos,Inspiration, the all-creative,Agains feels herself anew.

And as a fire gleams in the eye of the manWho has concieved a lofty design, soOnce more by the signs, the deeds of the world nowA fire has been kindled in the souls of the poets.And what came to pass before, though scarcely felt,Only now is manifest,And they who smiling tended our feilds for us,In the form of servants, they are known,The all-living, the powers of the gods.

Do you ask about them? In the song their spirit blows,When from the sun of day and warm earthIt awakens, and storms that are in the air, and othersThat more prepared in the depths of timeAnd more full of meaning, and more perceptible to us,Drift on between heaven and earth and among the peoples.The thoughts of the communal spirit they are,Quietly ending in the soul of the poet.

So that quickly struct, for a long timeKnown to the infinite, it quakesWith recollection, and kindled by the holy ray,Its fruit concieved in love, the work of gods and men,The song, so that it may bear witness to both, succeeds.So, as poets say, when she desired to seeThe god, visible, his lightning flash fell on Semele's houseAnd ashes mortally struck gave birth toThe fruit of the thunderstorm, to holy Bacchus.

And hence the sons of the earth now drinkHeavenly fire without danger.Yet us it behooves, you poets, to standBare-headed beneath God's thunderstorms,To grasp the father's ray, itself, with our own hands,And to offer to the peopleThe heavenly gift wrapt in song,For only if we are pure in heart,Like children, are our hands innocent.